Orko's Favorite Uncle

Deep in his cave, the wizard Tauron forges a Magic Amulet meant to summon powerful allies to help him conquer Eternia. The spell, combined with a passing storm, strands Prince Adam, Cringer and Orko in a Manticore's den, and pulls two Trollan sorcerers through from Trolla: Gark, who lands in Tauron's cave and is immediately bent to his will, and Montork, who turns up with Adam, Orko and the Manticore instead, to Orko's delight, since Montork is his favorite uncle.

While Montork and Orko share their reunion, Adam quietly recovers his sword and transforms into He-Man, with Cringer becoming Battle Cat, in time to fight off the Manticore and seal it inside its own cave. Tauron tracks Montork down at the Royal Palace and sends the now-enslaved Gark to retrieve him; Gark's magic is strong enough to turn Montork against his own nephew and erase his memory of their bond. Tauron then teleports both Trollans to his real target, Castle Grayskull, with Orko unable to stop Gark from taking his uncle.

Disguised as butterflies, Montork and Gark slip into Grayskull, and the Sorceress, sensing the intrusion and unable to fully lower the castle's drawbridge while under magical attack, calls He-Man for help. He-Man rides a Talon Fighter in at an angle to clear the half-raised bridge and frees the Sorceress, while a still-enchanted Montork fails to steal the parked fighter craft for Tauron. Meanwhile Battle Cat distracts Tauron in his cave long enough for Orko to wreck his store of dark magic, and the Amulet of Power ends up knocked into Orko's hands instead, which he uses to transport everyone, Tauron included, to Grayskull.

With Battle Cat holding Tauron down, Tauron makes one last attempt to use his hold over Montork to retrieve the amulet, but Montork breaks free of the spell and throws it to He-Man, who destroys it with his sword. Stripped of his magic, Tauron withers into a harmless old man. Freed from the amulet's power, Montork and Gark know they will soon be pulled back to Trolla, and Montork says a warm goodbye to his nephew as a rainbow forms over Castle Grayskull.

Orko: "My uncle Montork taught me a lot about magic. But not just the regular kind. He taught me how to see the magic that's all around us. Like for instance, there just has to be magic in anything as beautiful as a rainbow. And there's real magic in the way a mother takes care of her young. But, as my uncle said, 'The most wonderful magic of all is just being alive'. Bye now!"

John Erwin as He-Man/Prince Adam

Alan Oppenheimer as Battle Cat/Cringer and Tauron

Linda Gary as The Sorceress

Lou Scheimer (credited as Erik Gunden) as Orko and Uncle Montork

"You are my Uncle Montork. I'm Orko. You're under a spell, but I want you back."

- Orko

"Why should that little one look so familiar?"

- Montork, under Tauron's spell

"The most wonderful magic of all is just being alive."

- Uncle Montork

We've watched Orko spend most of this show's run as the Masters' designated screwup, the one whose magic fails when it's needed and works only for the gag. "Orko's Favorite Uncle" finally gives him a win. It never lets him win it through magic.

Uncle Montork arrives out of a lightning storm with the same Trollan powers Orko has, and promptly discovers they work no better on Eternia than his nephew's do. That's the episode's quiet joke before it becomes its real idea: for a Trollan, magic and competence are not the same thing, and Montork, "the best magician in our family" by Orko's own account, is every bit as useless against the manticore as Orko usually is against anything. Tauron doesn't need to out-duel him. He just needs an amulet and patience, and Tauron has plenty of both.

What makes the episode work is what it does with Montork once Tauron owns him. Lou Scheimer, voicing both Orko and his uncle, gives the spellbound Montork a blankness that keeps breaking, a half-second where the voice catches on "Orko?" before the character snaps back into service. "Why should that little one look so familiar?" he asks Gark, plainly unsettled by his own nephew, and the show lets that confusion sit there rather than resolving it with a convenient flashback. The possession plays less like a villain's puppet and more like a man losing an argument with himself in real time.

The back half puts the actual rescue in Orko's hands rather than He-Man's, and commits to it. He-Man does the fighting that needs doing, wrestling a manticore, chasing a Talon Fighter off a rampart, splitting an amulet with his sword. None of it breaks Tauron's hold on Montork. What does is Orko standing in the open, unarmed, reciting the trick lessons Montork taught him and insisting on the family bond Montork has been made to forget: "You are my Uncle Montork. I'm Orko." It's a strange thing for a Saturday-morning adventure to bet its climax on, a nephew's persistence rather than a hero's sword. The episode is confident enough in the bet to let the fight stop dead and just sit on Orko's face while he says it.

But the cost is a slack middle stretch. The palace banquet where Montork tells his story runs long for what it delivers, and the manticore, dispatched early, never returns to pay off the cave setup; Tauron himself stays a voice and a staff more than a character, present mostly to be beaten once the real work is done. Gark gets the better end of the episode's imagination: a flower-loving Trollan menace who'd rather admire a rose than fight, briefly funny and strange for a monster-of-the-week.

Then there's the moral, which for once actually matches the hour it's attached to. Most of these closing addresses feel bolted onto whatever lesson the network wanted that week. This one isn't. Montork spends the hour being more powerful and less present than his nephew, a magician whose magic keeps failing him in every way that counts, and Orko spends it being the one person whose non-magical insistence actually works. "The most wonderful magic of all is just being alive" isn't a line the episode reaches for at the last minute. It's the thing "Orko's Favorite Uncle" has been building toward since the title card.

1. Behind the scenes: Script was approved February 8, 1983 and final script revision took place April 12, 1983. In the original script, the Manticore was able to breathe fire.
2. Continuity: Tauron's character model was reused as the Town Crier in The Magic Falls as well as Nazghal in the She-Ra: Princess of Power episode Darksmoke and Fire. Cringer manages to roar just like Battle Cat, just like he did in A Beastly Sideshow. The animated sequence of He-Man stepping into frame as he watches the Talon Fighter fly overhead is based on the same movement used for Prince Adam looking up at the Wind Raider in Teela's Quest. The character model of Gark can be seen as part of the Keeper's menagerie in The Heart of a Giant.
3. Visual design: Montork's conical cap, red robe and floating gait echo Orko's own design, a visual shorthand for the family resemblance between the two Trollans.
4. Montork's first significant Filmation appearance. The character is treated as a competent (if eccentric) Trollan elder, foreshadowing the later Trolla-focused episodes.